


Survival Mode

by MCoorlim



Category: All Flesh Must Be Eaten
Genre: Let's Play
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-12
Updated: 2019-10-12
Packaged: 2020-12-13 16:28:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,672
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21000689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MCoorlim/pseuds/MCoorlim
Summary: Five tabletop gamers suddenly and without warning find themselves thrust into a series of dangerous and terrifying scenarios, forced to adapt and act like characters in a role playing game. They struggle to stay sane and in touch with their humanity as they try and figure out exactly what's going on and how they can stop the endless cycle.The twist? They are characters in a game, being played by the author as he writes the story. Survival Mode is a narrative solo roleplaying game Let's Play presented as serial fiction. Call it a LitsPlay, or a LPFic or something.This is in fact an Actual Play (simiar to a video game Let's Play) report of a game in progress, one that I play while writing, using real published RPG materials from different companies.





	1. Hello World 1.1

Nick found himself, in a fairly literal sense, sitting zoned out in front of a computer that he didn’t recognize. It definitely wasn’t his home PC. It wasn’t the one he’d been assigned at his mom’s marketing agency. The display wasn’t even a flatscreen, just an old CRT currently showing a spreadsheet in a primitive text-based environment, light beige letters on a black background.

His second realization was that he wasn’t sure where he was. It was an office, obviously, like his mom’s, but not the place he’d been strong-armed into interning at over the summer. He was dressed for work, office casual, in a short-sleeved pale blue dress shirt, slacks, and black leather lace-ups. But none of the ensemble was anything he’d owned, or anything he’d willingly wear.

_Work. I’m at work._ That context was obvious… he just didn’t know where he was. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten there, what his position was, or what his duties were. He was just… sitting in front of the screen, staring at rows of numbers, and he had been for at least a few minutes.

_Database entry,_ he guessed. But the loss of short term memory concerned him, and that concern turned to fear as he tried to remember coming to work, tried to remember his morning routine, tried to remember the exact date, or month even. How he’d gotten the job.

_Relax,_ he thought to himself. _Stay calm. This has to be a dream._ It did not, in fact, feel like a dream, and nothing happened when he tried to wake up. Fuck. Okay. Maybe I was drugged. Or coming out of a fugue. The neurological possibilities are endless. No, that wasn’t a through-line he wanted to follow. Stay. Calm.

He checked his pockets, found a phone, pulled it out. It was not his iPhone 11, but a much simpler, older model that he didn’t recognize. A dumb phone, too nice to be a burner. What the fuck. Do they still make these? He opened it, staring at the date on its tiny green digital display.

April 11th, 2000. What the fuck.

“Nick.”

Nick turned and spotted a familiar figure striding between the cubicles towards him, a broad-shouldered teen two years his elder, of East African descent, wearing a well tailored suit. “Marco?”

Marco’s usually easy-going expression was carefully neutral, his thick New York accent tinged with concern. “Hey man, what is this? What’s going on?”

Nick shook his head. “I don’t know, I was just… sitting here.”

Marco glanced back over his shoulder. “I was in that office over there. Where are we?”

Nick flipped open the phone and showed it to his friend. “Look at this.”

“Man, what-” his eyes widened. “2000, what the fuck?”

“Yeah, I don’t know.” Seeing Marco caught off-guard unsettled Nick further. While he himself was the GM of their gaming group, Marco, as the eldest and most self-assured, was certainly more the leader. He turned to the papers littering his desk, shuffling through them, looking for answers. What dates he did find confirmed the year.

“Marco?” The woman in the cubicle across from Nick’s workstation swiveled in her chair. “I’m going to need to leave early, can you tell Mr. Hudson?”

Marco exchanged a quick glance with Nick before answering. “Yeah, sure, that’s fine, go ahead.”

“Guess you’re in with the boss.” Nick stood up. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk.”

“I think I’m his secretary?” Marco pointed at the laptop satchel slung along Nick’s chair. “Don’t forget your bag.”

“I don’t have a… oh.”

The two set off, finding the elevator bank.

Marco thumbed the down arrow. “Man, what…”

“Time travel?” Nick suggested.

“Okay, but how? And why?”

“I don’t know.”

The door opened with a ding, and Nick and Marco found themselves staring at three more familiar faces from their weekend gaming marathons.

Ashly was dressed casually, though the jacket and shirt were more garish than she usually wore, and the jewelry was far more excessive. Her Arabic features were half-hidden under the baseball cap she wore, her long hair pulled back into a pony tail.

“Christ, Ash, what are you wearing?” Nick asked as he and Marco stepped into the elevator.

“That is what I was asking her!” Vera’s Serbian accent only came through when she was stressed, and she was very clearly stressed. In contrast to her usual casual clothing, she was wearing a navy blue skirt dress with dark tights.

“You’re one to talk,” Josh added. His outfit, at least, was in character, though the t-shirt under his leather jacket was woefully bereft of Japanese cartoon characters, and he was wearing full length jeans rather than his nearly trademark cargo shorts. Even more unusually, the outfit fit his ample frame, rather than being a size or two too large.

Ashly, at sixteen, was the youngest member of the group, though Nick only had six months on her. “Jesus, I don’t know. I was just… wandering through the halls upstairs like this.”

“And I was in the elevator.” Vera jerked a thumb at Josh. “With him.”

“And I have this.” Josh unzipped his duffel bag.

Nick leaned forward, saw a shotgun and revolver, and leaned back. “What the hell.”

“I don’t know.” Josh’s voice was urgent in its sincerity. “You know how I feel about guns.”

“Show them your phone.” Marco ushered Nick into the elevator, thumbing the lobby button as soon as he’d entered.

Nick pulled out the flip phone.

“2000?” Ashly asked. “What?”

“I don’t know,” Nick said. “Let’s just… head down to the lobby and try to figure out what’s going on.” He was beginning to doubt this was a dream, his gamer’s mind spinning elaborate scenarios to explain the scope it’d take to kidnap a group of people and convince them they’d gone almost twenty years back in time. But why? To what end? Actual factual time travel made more sense, and that wasn’t something he admitted lightly.

His train of thought was interrupted as the elevator ground to a halt with a sudden lurch, nearly throwing him into Marco’s back. The power went out seconds later, leaving the group bathed in the dim green glow of the brick phone’s display.

> _This brings us into our first scenario, Coffee Break of the Living Dead. As the title implies, it’s a scenario for All Flesh Must Be Eaten, and drops our protagonist group into the deep end. Nick is the viewpoint character for this adventure, but I’ll be giving that honor to the others in future scenarios._

“Shit,” Josh said, banging a meaty fist against the elevator wall.

“Now what?” Marco asked.

“Try the doors?” Ashly suggested.

Nick turned in the darkness and tried to find the doors’ seam with his hands. It was too thin to slip his fingers into. “Gimmie a hand Marco.” He handed his phone to Vera, flipped open to provide light to see by.

Both men pressed their palms against the doors, trying in vain to pry them apart.

“No good,” Marco said.

“There’s a built in phone,” Vera opened a small panel near the buttons, picking up a black plastic receiver. “It’s ringing.” She frowned, listening for half a minute, then hung it up.

“Nobody picked up?” Josh asked.

“Someone picked up,” Vera said. “But they didn’t say anything-”

The sudden sound of a gunshot somewhere outside cut her off.

“Shit!” Nick instinctively ducked back against the elevator wall, covering his head with his hands.

“Is that-” Ashly asked, only to be answered by the sounds of more screams and gunshots, the last particularly close. She stared, slack jawed, at the doors.

Silence followed, broken only by Vera’s low, “What the fuck.” She looked down at Nick’s phone, still in her hand. “We’re not getting a signal in here. We should save the battery.” She snapped it closed, returning them to darkness.

“Nothing we can do but wait for help.” Marco said.

“You okay, Vera?” Nick asked. He knew that she’d seen some rough things before coming to the US, and was worried that she might be carrying some PTSD. It wasn’t anything she’d ever talked about in anything but the most general terms.

“Yeah.” Vera’s voice was quiet in the darkness. “Let’s just… wait it out.”

> _And we’re off. As with a group game’s first session, most of our time was spent establishing our party, the situation, and leading up to the action. This seems like a good post-length; let me know if you think they should be longer or shorter._
> 
> _Each character has a very general “gamer profile” for emulating their choices (somewhat) unrelated to their GURPS stats, but informed by their disadvantages and quirks. What “type” of player they are. Power Gamer, storyteller, etc. For major choices there will be a roll to see how much they deviate from the obvious choice; minor decisions and arbitrary choices will be fiat._
> 
> _In this session the only such choice made was a minor one: Does Josh reveal his guns to the others (group action) or keep it secret (individual action)? The dice ruled that he did._

_Next Time: You might think that getting yourself stuck in an elevator almost 20 years ago is as weird as it gets. You would be wrong._


	2. Hello World 1.2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _This story was originally posted here: <https://taoscordian.com/survival-mode/> where it may be updated more frequently._
> 
> _ Previously, our protagonists suddenly found themselves in an unfamiliar office building years before they were even born. Running into one another as they tried to find answers, they climbed into an elevator only to have it get stuck._

Time passed, an hour at least, with the five friends in the elevator discussing the strangeness they found themselves in. It was the same story all around - they’d suddenly become aware that they were in an unfamiliar circumstance, wearing unfamiliar clothing, in the same unfamiliar building. And none of them had any short term memory of what they’d been doing just prior, or even what time of year it was.  
  
They were an odd mix, Nick reflected. He’d met Marco in grade school, a rich thirteen-year old philanthropist who’d grown up homeless, donating a large sum to a charity fund Nick’s old man was organizing. That generosity was Marco’s hallmark and carried through everything he’d done, from opening soup kitchens and scholarship funds to the troubled youth center on an old farm on the outskirts of New York.  
  
Vera he’d met a year earlier, a Serbian orphan girl, relocated to America with the help of, again, his father. She’d recovered from the trauma of her family’s death at the hand of the local cartels with her typical stoic humor, going to trade school to learn automotive and motorcycle repair, had been through so much, but never let it get her down. Still, having known her for as long as he had, Nick knew that a dark shadow was never far beneath the surface.  
  
Sometimes he felt guilty about his own life, comparing the ease of his wealthy upbringing with those of Marco and Vera’s - a refugee from East Africa who’d grown up without a family, and the girl who’d watched her own die. He’d had “all the advantages” An education at a private school, extracurricular art classes, the year at the European art institute his parents had been dangling in front of him… he’d been coasting on privilege while the others plugged on.  
  
Josh was… well, Josh. Not the kind of guy you’d have chosen to be stuck in an elevator with. It wasn’t that Nick didn’t like the guy, it’s just that he saw in the older boy a cautionary tale, a future image of who he could have been, an obsessive anime fanboy without real ambition or the ability to follow through with what he’d started. Josh made him think about his own sense of self-importance, his own weight issues, his own failings, and Nick had to admit that he hated the guy just a little bit for it. It seemed that, at times, Josh was Nick’s own worst possible self. Maybe that’s why he hung out with him, to keep himself humble. Did that make him a shitty person?  
  
Ashly was the newest member of the group, a girl that had Nick had met freshman year and invited to their monthly role-playing game sessions. She, like Vera, was tough, but there was a colder edge to her, something Nick attributed to her desire to go into nursing - a profession that involved watching people die on a regular basis. She was the youngest member of the group, and he supposed that growing up Arab-American had its own set of challenges that he could never understand.**[1]**

Light bloomed from across the elevator. Josh had found a mag-light in the bag, and was siting through it. “Shotgun. Three boxes of shells. Revolver… .38 I think. And four boxes of rounds.”  
  
“That’s what, 200 handgun rounds?” Marco asked. “You planning a party?”  
  
“Maybe.” Josh held up a bottle of whiskey and gave it a shake. “What do you got?”  
  
“Nothing here,” Marco said. “Though I had a palm pilot in my office.”  
  
“A what?” Ashly asked.  
  
“Palm pilot. Like an early smart phone. Without the phone. Oh, and a pager.”  
  
“I have one of those, too,” Ashly said. “Took me a minute to figure out what it was. What do you have in the bag, Nick?”  
  
Nick slid the laptop bag off his shoulder. “Shine that light over here, Josh? Okay. Uh… laptop. Notebook. Another pager. Oh, and a pocket flashlight.”  
  
“Were pagers really that common?” Ashly asked.  
  
“Maybe if you were a doctor,” Nick said. “Or a drug dealer.”  
  
Vera tilted Josh’s light towards the elevator ceiling. “You guys want to try the hatch?” Calmer now, her voice had lost its Serbian edge.[2]

“It’s pretty high up there.” Josh said. “Maybe with a boost?”

“Shh, shh, shh,” said Ashly. “Listen.”  
  
In the silence that followed Nick could hear soft shuffling noises from the shaft above the elevator. “What the hell-”  
  
More gunshots, from above, followed by the sound of something crashing onto the roof. The car dropped an inch or so.  
  
“Shit!” Ashly hissed.  
  
“Oh, we need to get the fuck out of here,” Marco said, scrambling to his feet.

Vera gestured to Nick. “Come on, me and Josh’ll give you a boost up.”[4]  
  
“Me?” Nick asked. “Why me?”  
  
“Because we’re strongest and you’re heavier than the others. Get you up first, you help pull the others up.” She gestured towards Josh. “Come on, gimmie a hand. We get Nick up, then Ashly, then Marco, then me, then you - you’re tallest.”  
  
“Sounds good to me,” Ashly said.  
  
Nick nodded in resignation, putting a foot in Vera’s hands. She and Josh boosted him up, and he quickly unfastened the hand-screws on the hatch’s underside, aware of how unsteady the hands holding him were. Pushing it open, he found the opening a tight but not impossible fit and he began struggling up to the roof. He could see, maybe six floors up, dim lighting indicating that the doors to the elevator shaft had been wrenched open.

  
A soft noise came from his left, and Nick turned his head to come face to grotesquely mangled face of the source of the earlier crash, some unfortunate bastard who’d fallen from the doors above. His face had split open in the fall, one eye was dangling from its socket by the root, slapping wetly against his cheek.  
  
Nick stared at it in silent horror - then it began to move, reaching towards him with one bloody hand.[5]

“Pull me down!” He struggled away as the dead thing dragged itself closer. “Pull me down pull me down pull me down!”  
  
The others yanked him down into the elevator just as it reached him, and the crawling corpse fell down through the hatch after him.  
  
Someone screamed - possibly Ashly, possibly Marco - and they all tried to flatten against the walls to get away from the thing that had fallen, squirming, in their midst, lit only by Josh’s flashlight.  
  
“What the fuck is that?” Marco was saying. “What the fuck is that?”  
  
“Nghaa!” was all Nick could manage, scrambling away until his back was to the doors, the corpse scrabbling at his feet.  
  
The ground tilted, and then the elevator was falling, crashing down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Footnotes. Remember, these are game mechanics, stats, and other notes about the game being played._
> 
> [1]Many of the PC choices are being made with the Mythic Oracle, a system to let the dice make choices for you. You ask it a question, roll dice, and get an answer. Our question here: Is there interpersonal drama during the elevator confinement? It’s a stressful situation, and Josh is a troublemaker, but the group is accustomed to one another.  
0-50 - Yes  
51-100 - No  
Result: 62
> 
> [2]Mythic: Will they try the hatch?  
34: Yes.
> 
> [3]GURPS: The core system everything is being translated into is GURPS by Steve Jackson Games. Now we need to check to see if anyone hears something happening outside, and we do that with a Listen roll. Everyone passes.
> 
> [4] We roll randomly to see which PC has to check out the hatch. Nick "wins."
> 
> [5] GURPS: Nick rolls a Fright Check against his Will. He passes, but is still freaked out.
> 
> Next time: A short drop and an abrupt stop. And then… things get worse.


End file.
